CIC launches design indicators

The Construction Industry Council and the government will launch a new tool next month to assess the design and quality of buildings.

The Design Quality Indicator will assess buildings for their functionality, performance and impact on their environment.

The DQI is to be launched by the Department for Culture Media and Sport on 8 July and will be adopted by the ministerial design champions of each government department.

The scheme is to be piloted by more than 100 organisations invited by the CIC to subject their projects to DQI assessment. The pilot scheme will be run from this July to May next year.

The government hopes the tool will work in tandem with the industry's key performance indicators, which assess the process of construction.

Outgoing CIC chairman Michael Dixon, who oversaw the formulation of the design indicators, said they had been launched to help multidisciplinary teams create a scorecard on the value of a building or its brief.

Dixon said: "They are a shared language across different disciplines. And they are a means by which the designers can be held to account over the finished product, so that they can learn by feedback."

The DQI assessment will take the form of a simple 90-question, four-page questionnaire and is intended to be used by everyone involved in the production or use of a building, including clients, designers, contractors, facilities managers, users and visitors.

The assessment can be used at any stage in a project's development process from the initial setting of the brief through to the completion of the building.

The DQI system was devised by architects Robin Nicholson and Sunand Prasad and building technologist David Gann.

Turlough O'Brien, deputy chairman of the Arup Group, takes over this week as the seventh chairman of the Construction Industry Council.